352 WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING. 



management of grass lands. Pastures overgrown 

 with bushes and chequered by quaking, miry bogs ; 

 meadows foul with every weed, from white daisy up 

 to the rankest brakes, with hill-sides that may once 

 have been productive, but from which crop after 

 crop has been taken and nothing returned to them, 

 until their yield has shrunk to half or three- fourths 

 of a tun of poor hay, these are the average indications 

 of a farm nearly run out by the poorest sort of farm- 

 ing. Such farms were common in the !N~ew England 

 of my boyhood ; I trust they are less so to-day ; yet 

 I seldom travel ten miles in any region north or east 

 of the Delaware without seeing one or more of them. 



Fifty years ago, I judge that the greater part of 

 the hay made in New-England was cut from sour, 

 boggy land, that was devoted to grass simply because 

 nothing else could be done with it. I have helped to 

 carry the crop off on poles from considerable tracts on 

 which oxen could not venture without miring. It were 

 superfluous to add that no well-bred animal would 

 eat such stuff, unless the choice were between it and 

 absolute starvation. In many cases, a very little work 

 done in opening the rudest surface-drains would have 

 transformed these bogs into decent meadows, and the 

 product, by the help of plowing or seeding, into un- 

 exceptionable hay. 



There are not many farmers, apart from our wise 

 and skillful dairymen, who use half enough grass- 

 seed ; men otherwise thrifty often fail in this respect. 

 If half our ordinary faVmers would thoroughly seed 



